A British researcher who studied elephants' fear of being stung by bees has been given a gong for developing a fence of beehives to reduce clashes between humans and the mighty mammals.
Dr Lucy King's invention stops the giant animals from wandering onto farm land and causing havoc because they are so terrified of swarms of the …

Expensive in effort and expertise then maybe

Who cares about honey yields..?

"...effort and expertise then maybe..."

Seriously, who gives a damn about the honey? The hives are there to protect the crops - If they do that, any honey harvested is pure bonus. And since the bees themselves will reproduce to populate the hives, maintenance costs are minimal.

not really

I've worked with a few beekeepers, and the design of hives is quite simple; any half-decent carpenter can build them. Making the wax comb foundation is a bit trickier, but I'm sure someone could set up an operation with support from a microlending bank. Honey yields might not be great with that many hives close together, but it's essentially free.

is this another Australia in the making?

so we're going to take what we've been told is a "fragile ecosystem" and introduce a massive increase of one particular life form to deal with another? Especially when, in order to get the coverage needed to be useful, large scale bee breeding programs will need to be instituted, with plenty of opportunity to "improve" the species for "economic" reasons?

or are going to be assailed by the global warming alarmists who see an increase in the "aggressive Africanized" honey bees as a sign of the Thermocalypse and not a thing to do with a massive increase of cultivation of said bees for "fencing"?

um, no...

Suppose

Forget the bees! They're a fussy, doomed species anyway--high maintenance even on the way out. But there's a market for elephant-proof, elephant-detecting, solar-powered kit of a proprietary, DRM'n'TPM'ed nature to playback copywritten--nay, patented--digital bee sounds as and when necessary, from singletons to swarms, to protect the precious GM crops in certain farmers' fields ... at a price, of course. IT? I love IT!

can this scale up?

The bees over there must be a lot sturdier than the varieties we have here in Europe. Here, keeping colonies from collapsing due to a staggering array of factors (varroa mites and other parasites, bacteria and viruses, wasps (and soon hornets from France), starvation, cold, pesticides, being too weak to survive due to stubbornly swarming away the majority of the population in the hive, etc, etc), is what makes beekeeping less a hobby, and more a vocation.

Even though the climate will help some of these problems (cold and starvation), I still doubt that beehives can just be set up and forgotten, and maintaining the sheer number of hives to surround even a small farm would be a full time job.

Not to mention, where will all these bees come from? And what will they eat? They will all be competing for the same resources (nectar and pollen from flowers), so beyond a certain density of colonies per area, the competition will mean that some of the colonies will either move out, or die.

This is not to say I am not impressed with the idea, but it seems to have some holes in (rather like the elephants if they get too near the fence :P )